......Like everyone else I just kind of learned through trial and error that it's best to keep the world at a safe distance. If you show them who you really are, you run the risk of ridicule and rejection. That false self was my first and only line of defense, and it needed constant polishing, repair, and adjustment.
In 1972 my family left our roaming military life behind in Texas and returned home to the Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon. I was heading into my senior year of high school, which posed some problems, but I was still pretty happy to return to a place I’d lived as a younger boy, the place where both sets of my beloved grandparents still lived.
A few years ago I read a wonderful little book by Michael Casey, a Cistercian monk and prior of Tarrawarra Abbey in Victoria, Australia. The book, "Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina", clarified a practice I'd already "accidentally" stumbled into on my spiritual journey.
